The psychedelic rock explosion of the mid-sixties that
first surfaced in San Francisco was the product of many colliding factors.
The impact of the Beatles, funny smelling smoke and the Vietnam War would
not have had nearly the impact on music that it did had their not been a
ready supply of folk musicians already performing and looking for something
new. The folk scene in the early 60s had been the strongest in Cambridge,
Massachusetts and Greenwich Village. The successful performers from those
scenes all had a chance to record and tour, and some of them—Joan Baez and
Bob Dylan, most notably—became quite famous. Although every big city and
college town had some kind of local folk scene in the early 60s, Berkeley’s
scene was probably the most developed after the Cambridge/Greenwich axis.

Folk music was popular
and successful in San Francisco in the late 1950s and early 60s, but San
Francisco was (as always) a breeding ground for artists of all types, and
folk music was just part of a scene of Beat poetry, jazz and other arts. San
Francisco was also the incubator for popular folk music, like The Kingston
Trio. Nightclubs like the Hungry i and The Purple Onion popularized folk
music for a wide audience, but serious musicians were sceptical about
popular music in general. Berkeley and its intellectual culture, on the
other hand, always more of a Petri Dish than an environment (it is a
Berkeley axiom that the counter man in a Donut Shop may have an advanced
degree and read several languages) made it the western outpost for ‘serious’
folk music. Berkeley’s limits on alcohol sales within a mile of campus
insured that jazz and nightclubs stayed in San Francisco, leaving folk music
and strong coffee as the primary source of night time entertainment.

In the early 1960s, there
was a “folk circuit” anchored by Cambridge, Massachusetts and Berkeley,
California. Folksingers could play the
Club 47 in Cambridge, go down to Greenwich Village, and work there way
across the country, possibly hitchhiking, and sleeping on the couches and
floors of other folkniks. The history of this circuit is best covered in
the book Baby Let Me Follow You Down (Eric von Schmidt and Jim
Rooney, UMass Press 1979).

The Cabale, and later
Cabale Creamery, (2504 San Pablo at Dwight in Berkeley), founded by Rolf
Cahn, Debbie Green, Howard Ziehm and
Chandler A. Laughlin III, was a crucial stop on this circuit. In the
mid 1950s Cahn had founded and run the Blind Lemon at 2362 San Pablo - a
mainstay of the Berkeley folk scene for many years to come. By August 1964, the Cabale was partially owned by Carroll Peery, manager of the Chambers
Brothers (later, after their souls became psychedelized, to hit with Time
Has Come Today), who subsequently moved to Cambridge themselves. Carroll
Peery had moved to Berkeley in February 1964 at the request of Barbara Dane
who was, at the time, trying to buy into the Jabberwock from Mary Randall,
Belle Stauber and John Stauber and wanted Carroll
to manage it. Apparently, the deal fell through because of difficulties in
obtaining a liquor license.

Bay Area bluegrass
musician Sandy Rothman has written a brief but excellent
memoir of the Cabale as part of a project on the great Clarence White.

When the Cabale finally
folded some time in mid 1965, there was still a need for a folk club in
Berkeley. The Jabberwock had opened in 1963, initially closed on Mondays and
Tuesdays but soon to put on the first shows. The
Berkeley String Quartet played at the Jabberwock in late 1964 or early
1965 and it would be a reasonable assumption that music was a regular on the
Jabberwock menu at this time.

Campbell Coe captured
the Jabberwock experimenting with performances from the new

psychedelic bands, such
as Circus Maximus who are pictured above in October 1966 with

Barry Melton of Country
Joe and the Fish (front centre). To the left is the poster of the event

Photograph taken by
Campbell Coe

The Jabberwock was
located at 2901 Telegraph Avenue at Russell (near Ashby) and was owned and
run by Bill "Jolly Blue" Ehlert who bought it from Mary Randall, Belle
Stauber and John Stauber on March 23, 1965. It was on the site of a former
jazz club called Tsubo (where Wes Montgomery recorded his album Full House on
July 25, 1962). Tsubo had been opened by entrepreneur Glenn Ross in
September 1961 with the Berkeley jazz station
KJAZ-FM was housed in the same building. Well liked by the city as
it served no alcohol and minors were welcome, it was not sustainable. Driven purely by the economics of
running such an establishment, Tsubo finally went out of business on October
15, 1962 - Ross having sunken his life savings of more than $35,000 in to
the place, and he still came out of it in debt. At some
point shortly thereafter, the name board was changed from Tsubo to
the Jabberwock.

The Jabberwock initially
followed the same booking policy as The Cabale Creamery where a typical
month had mostly blues and folk, with some jug and bluegrass mixed in.
Whilst the Jabberwock had a monthly entertainment calendar published as a
handbill, the handbills and the posters themselves did not become
‘collectible’ until later, when the club started booking rock bands, such as
Country Joe and the Fish, as well as folk groups.

While the list of
performers at the Jabberwock were generally less well known than those
playing the Fillmore at the same time, or even Greenwich Village, the years
when the Jabberwock was the primary club venue in Berkeley serve as a useful
primer for how music evolved from folk to rock, and in many ways
subsequently returned in the form of singer-songwriters. In San Francisco,
the presence of the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1966
provided a venue that paid real money (by the standards of the time) for
musicians to perform, and San Francisco folk music disappeared in a puff of
green smoke. In the South Bay, many folk musicians with no chance of getting
by financially in San Jose and Palo Alto coffeehouses were drawn to the San
Francisco scene and joined rock bands as well (Jorma Kaukonen, University of
Santa Clara class of ’64 and the Jefferson Airplane, and Jerry Garcia, Menlo
Park High School and the Grateful Dead, are among the most prominent).

The Berkeley String
Quartet

(Carl Shrager, Bob Cooper,
Joe McDonald and Bill Steele)

on the Sproul Hall steps

Berkeley had its own
material conditions that make the Jabberwock a useful point of reference. UC
Berkeley had at least 20,000 students at the time, and with many former
graduate students in a perpetual state of “taking a few years off,” there
was a ready supply of highly intellectualized but still young fans anxious
to consume interesting music beyond the Beach Boys. At the same time, since
Berkeley was dominated by the University, the few available venues for rock
concerts were University or city operated (the 3,500 seat Berkeley Community
Theater was actually the High School auditorium), so there was little chance
for a Berkeley competitor to the Fillmore, despite a few local efforts.

In any case, with the
Fillmore and the Avalon in easy driving distance, Berkeley residents weren’t
looking to Berkeley for rock shows, but rather for more casual local events.
The Jabberwock filled this need, providing a low-cost venue, easily
accessible (9 blocks from campus) and open every night, but still providing
high quality music. The evolution of the Jabberwock from a folk club
presenting hip music on the Cambridge (Club 47) model to a largely club
catering to more specialized tastes provides a clear picture of the
evolution at the time. The changing economics of clubs—remember, except for
the Matrix in San Francisco, The Whisky A-Go-Go in Los Angeles
and The Marquee in London, rock clubs had hardly been invented—was
just one of many factors that made the Jabberwock an anachronism by the end
of 1967.

From 1963 until March
1965, The Jabberwock was run by Belle Randall and her husband John Stauber,
a classical guitarist and folk accompanist. Belle has identified Jesse
Fuller, Bukka White, Ian & Sylvia, Perry Lederman and Don Crawford as
artists who played the club during her tenure. She also mentions future Joy
of Cooking guitarist Terry Garthwaite as a regular performer (playing as The
Garthwaites, with her older brother Tim, not the younger brother David who
was in Joy of Cooking). Terry Garthwaite also played the Cabale Creamery
with a group called Crab Grass at this time. Every Sunday night was
Flamenco night, led by “El Rubio,” in fact a former Berkeley High School
classmate of Belle Randall’s named Davey Jones. Bob Dylan even came into The
Jabberwock, in 1964, just before his Berkeley Community Theater show (on
February 22). ED Denson's
liner notes to the 1964 version of Blind Joe Death by John Fahey
state "He has played to standing audiences in the Washington, D.C.
Unicorn; in the Jabberwock, the Blind Lemon, and the Cabale in Berkeley".

Although the earliest
posters, handbills and newspaper listings advertising shows at the
Jabberwock date from 1965, a quote from
Country Joe McDonald on Pete Frame's Country Joe and the Fish
family tree alludes to the
Berkeley String Quartet playing at the Jabberwock. The
BSQ comprised Joe McDonald, Carl Shrager, Bob Cooper and either Bill
Steele or Toby Lightheiser on bass and they were in business between
September 1964 and February 1965.

Poster artist
Tom Weller has even earlier memories: "When I came away to college in
1962, I lived in a rooming house around the block from the Jabberwock. It
was a beatnik sort of place at that point, walls all painted black and
espresso and cool jazz. A few years later it became part of the folk scene
and then the hippie scene (but the walls stayed black)".

The University of
California at Berkeley was ground zero for anti-war activism, and had been
nationally prominent since the Free Speech Movement went national in 1964.
Local folksinger Joe McDonald with friends Eugene “ED” Denson (who had
produced records with guitarist John Fahey) and Mike Beardslee published two
magazines as DMB Publications (Rag Baby and Et Tu). For their
second Rag Baby issue, they had no written copy, so they produced a
record instead (the "talking" issue). Barry Melton, McDonald and a few other
members of the
Instant Action Jug Band recorded two of Joe’s songs as Country Joe and
The Fish. ED Denson made up the name, a reference to Stalin (“Country Joe”)
and Mao (a reference to the revolutionary being a fish in the ocean of the
masses). The record was laid down at the home studio of a friend, Arhoolie
Records founder Chris Strachwitz, on September 24, 1965. “Rag Baby” EP #1
was released in October, 1965 as a 7 inch 33 1/3 rpm record. The A-side
features the prototype Country Joe and The Fish playing
“Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-To-Die Rag” and “Superbird” with the b-side containing
"Fire in the City" and "Johnny's Gone to the War" by Bay Area folksinger
Peter Krug. This ad hoc group of musicians could not have known at the time
that I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die would become, in all probability,
the best known anti-war song of the 1960s.

Amazingly, although
“distribution” consisted of being sold by Joe and Barry Melton in Sproul
Plaza during the UC Berkeley Campus Teach-In Against the Vietnam War
(October 15, 1965) and being available at Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue,
the independently released record started to sell a little bit. McDonald
and Melton did a brief tour (laid down in legend as The Great Northwest
Tour) in the fall of 1965 as Country Joe and The Fish, possibly
sponsored by Students For Democratic Society (SDS), of campuses and other
activist hotbeds in the Pacific Northwest. Over to Joe: As far as the
"Tour" I will tell you what I remember. Calling it a tour is a stretch.
Barry would still be 17 years old. We rode the Greyhound Bus, it ran a
ticketed journey from Oakland up North. We played in Portland or Seattle or
one of those cities at someone's house, like in their living room. To a
group of people. I guess that the thing was set up by SDS?! We were at a
college up there Reed College? Did we play ....I guess so. That is him and
me both with guitars. What did we sing? I don't know. Even more
amazingly, as a courtesy, McDonald gave Strachwitz’s company the publishing
rights to “Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-To-Die Rag.” As a result of Fish album sales
and the phenomenal sales of the Woodstock album (and its famous cheer), the
song funded Arhoolie Records loving documentation of blues, folk and zydeco
music for the next few decades. Another oblique reference found to The
Jabberwock in 1965 is that Steve Miller, on a scouting trip from the Midwest
in the fall, apparently discovered future bassist Lonnie Turner at the club.
When Miller returned in October 1966, he would draft Turner to join his
other Midwestern transplants (Curley Cooke and Tim Davis) to start the Steve
Miller Band in December 1966.

Although no specific
dates have been confirmed, The Instant Action Jug Band certainly
played the Jabberwock regularly during the spring and summer of 1965. Many
of the dozen or so "members" of the group lived in the apartment complex
that was part of the same building.

The joke was that
whichever members did not have another show or date were in the band for the
night, and ready to spring into action instantly - hence the name. The band
in particular played on nights when no one else was booked, so that locals
coming in for a cup of coffee or a beer had something to listen to.

Bill "Jolly Blue" Ehlert
(pictured left) with Spider John Koerner

Photograph taken by
Campbell Coe

The Instant Action Jug
Band has passed into legend since some of its members became
Country Joe and The Fish, accounting for that group’s willingness to
play The Jabberwock even when they were a regular act at the Fillmore
Auditorium and Avalon Ballroom over the bay in San
Francisco.

Both Joe McDonald and
Barry Melton lived in Mrs Sherrill's apartment house (on Russell Street
behind the Jabberwock) and played the 'Wock regularly before they became
well known. Two other residents were Bruce Barthol and Paul Armstrong, soon
to join Joe and Barry, together with David Cohen and John Francis Gunning in
the fledgling Country Joe and the Fish. Joe, David, Bruce and drummer
Chicken Hirsh are still in business today and have toured throughout the
North America and the UK during 2004 and 2005 as the Country Joe Band.
Barry has continued to play music during the course of his legal career.

Thanks are due Tom who
kindly gave permission for them to be reproduced here.

Another Berkeley group,
The Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band, was also formed out of the
casual membership of The Instant Action Jug Band. Much later, The
Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band produced a couple of albums, one the
infamous Masked Marauders, that included
Gary “Chicken” Hirsch of Country Joe and the Fish, on drums.

1966 was probably the
peak of The Jabberwock, although it was still largely a folk club at this
time. While electric psychedelic bands were forming in San Francisco,
Berkeley and elsewhere at this time, acoustic performers playing folk, blues
and bluegrass were still the standard entertainment in college towns. Many
of these same performers, peculiarly influenced by strange smelling smoke,
would turn up in rock bands in the next few years.

At 1:45 am on June 4,
1966, twenty year old aspiring musician and photographer
Jef Jaisun walked in to The Jabberwock for the first time, Perry
Lederman was playing. Jaisun would go on to work for Max Scheer's Berkeley
Barb and later become immortal in the Bay Area for producing the much-played
and fondly remembered record
Friendly Neighborhood Narco Agent. This independently released EP from 1969,
was later picked up
Dr Demento, and the song reached an audience outside the Bay Area.
Click
here for the hilarious and unbelievable story of this song.

Jef recalls "The entire package was patterned after Country Joe's Rag
Baby EPs, right down to using Sierra Sound as the recording studio. I
figured if it worked for him, well... not to mention that people in the Bay
Area, and Berkeley in particular, had become accustomed to that type of EP
packaging, thanks mostly to Joe. Several other folkies released similar EPs
about the same time".

This photograph,
according to the annotation on the reverse, was taken "probably Summer
1966".

Thanks are due Jef who
kindly gave permission for it to be reproduced here.

In late 1966
Jesse Cahn, son of Cabale founder Rolf Cahn and folksinger
Barbara Dane, returned from playing drums for the Chambers Brothers on
the East Coast to manage the Jabberwock for Bill Ehlert when he was called
on to go over to The City (San Francisco) and manage the Matrix.

Jesse recalls "I also
played drums with Lightnin' Hopkins at the Jabberwock while making
sandwiches back in the kitchen ... it was a trip ... whip off my apron and
run up on stage to play with po' Lightnin' and then back to the kitchen and
try not to cut a finger off in the frantic transition...". Jesse
continues "Country Joe and the Fish would rehearse in the afternoon while
I swept up... Great times...".

Jesse also remembers
Country Joe and the Fish coming back from the Human Be-In (January 14, 1967)
"still buzzing on acid and Barry sitting on top of the cold case and
rambling about what it had been like playing for all the tripped out people
while tripping himself".

After a few months Jesse
headed back east, travelling with Chan Laughlin, ultimately ending up in New
York City. He later helped to road-manage the Chambers Brothers "off and
on up to around early '69".

Photograph taken by
Campbell Coe

Toward the end, the 'Wock
had been through a series of unsuccessful co-operative managements before
Sally Henderson took the helm for the last couple of months. Although the
Jabberwock had survived financial difficulties since the start and a number
of brushes with the authorities, it was the Berkeley Health and Building
Departments that finally drove the Jabberwock out of business. The building
was re-classified "due to increased occupant load" - the result of which was
the need for remodelling that simply was not financially viable.

The Jabberwock finally
closed its doors on July 8, 1967; Hank Bradley recalled that "the last
notes played at the Jabberwock were by Rick Shubb, Doc Watson, and Hank
Bradley" and this is confirmed by Jef Jaisun's "obituary" for the
Jabberwock in the Berkeley Barb (Volume 5, Number 1 (Issue 99) dated July
7-13, 1967) and the listings provided in The Scenedrome therein.

The Berkeley Barb

The Jabberwock was
remembered with an obituary in The Berkeley Barb (Volume 5, Number 1
(Issue 99) dated July 7-13, 1967) written by Jef Jaisun. The building
was later torn down and eventually replaced with a car park. The Freight and
Salvage, successor to the Jabberwock on the Berkeley Folk scene, opened at
its original location of 1827 San Pablo in June 1968.

On July 25, 1969, Don
Kaufman published an article in the Berkeley Barb entitled Flower Lady.
This told the story of how seventy-four Mrs. Sherrill had converted an ugly,
barren lot (previously The Jabberwock) on the corner of Telegraph and
Russell into a bed of flowers, warming the hearts of hundreds of passers-by
in the process. Mrs. Sherrill, who ran the apartment building behind the
Jabberwock on Russell where the fledgling Country Joe and the Fish had lived
during 1965 and 1966, was a retired kindergarten teacher who had been born
in Alabama.

Mrs. Sherrill surveys her
work on the site of the Jabberwock.

In April 2006 Sandy
Rothman unearthed a wonderful collection of photographs of the Jabberwock
taken by the late Campbell Coe. These photographs have been scanned and
posted to the
Jabberwock Yahoo Groupby Tom Weller.

The list of
Jabberwock shows is largely based on advertisements placed in The
Berkeley Barb and from information provided by the
posters and handbills that have survived. The Jabberwock was generally
open six nights a week (including a Sunday “hoot” night with any locals who
wanted to play). There are still a few of "holes" in the listings, not
least the first six months after the Jabberwock was reborn under the Jolly
Blue Giant.

Any informants with real
or imagined information about other acts playing the Jabberwock are
encouraged to
contact us. This is an ongoing project always subject to revision.

October 2005 saw the premiere of Bobby
Roth's Berkeley, a feature film about
music and protest in the 60s, at the Mill Valley Film Festival. The film
features ten songs by Jabberwock favourites Country Joe and the Fish. You
can see a trailer for the movie, which has now been released on DVD,
here.

The apartment house where Bruce, Barry, Paul Armstrong
and Joe of Country Joe and the Fish lived and David and John Francis
Gunning hung out as seen on

October 7, 2005. The house, located on
Russell Street, right behind where the Jabberwock was on Telegraph Avenue.
Originally, Robbie Basho shared the house with Bruce, Barry and Paul with Joe
only moving in when Basho was encouraged to leave. Mrs. Sherrill, the

landlady, lived downstairs and was one of their
biggest fans (although it is recorded that she had hearing difficulties!).